The National Bureau of Investigation published a slightly obfuscated list of the 16,000 victims, which brought down their website. They had 60,000 simultaneous connection attempts to the site. The question is how would the officials communicate with the public if it were a real national disaster.

Guess Anon just wanted some names. Wonder what use this could've had at all. Can't be much use, if they know who the people are, unless they plan on just selling the information, which won't do much anyway.

"Idle hands are the devil's tools." Other cultures have similar sayings. Basically, when people are not busy working (or learning), they find themselves more likely to cause mischief. Nothing new here.

"Idle hands are the devil's tools." Other cultures have similar sayings. Basically, when people are not busy working (or learning), they find themselves more likely to cause mischief.

Many Christians think that phrase is from the bible because it talks of the devil; it isn't. It's from Chaucer's "Tale of Melibee". Another bogus bible quote -- "The Lord helps those who help themselves."

How about this one -- "the love of money is the root of all evil"? Yep, 1 Timothy 6:10.

I disagree, the problem is that historically kids have had too little power, having everything decided for them by adults who supposedly know better.

What we're seeing is a backlash from this, when kids finally find a way of gaining freedom whether it's through something like the internet or simply by becoming old enough to get away from their parents, then they don't know how to handle the responsibility of that freedom.

This is for example why England's young have such a binge drinking problem, because we h

This is for example why England's young have such a binge drinking problem, because we have a culture of not letting kids near alcohol whatsoever under any circumstances, whilst those countries such as in Europe who may let their young have a glass of wine at christmas, or slowly drink alcohol in a relaxed manner at other times, have far less problems with it as the kids become old enough to buy their own.

I get really fed up with people trotting this out, as though you never see anyone drunk in Denmark, Germany, Spain or Greece. It's bollocks.

Just like last time? No! Way worse than last time. Yes the gangs in Chicago and New York were ruthless and all that, but they didn't leave heads on stakes to prove a point. The level of violence has exceeded prohibition by such a large amount that it is almost criminal for our government to either sit by and do nothing, or to continue prohibition. Especially when much of this is about pot for crying out loud. I mean really? Let the people get stoned if they want. What the fuck is the problem? You l

You see, Anonymous and their supporters will accept the "Anyone can be Anonymous" position only when it's in their favor -- for example when law enforcement makes a public effort to arrest them, then no voice represents Anonymous, Anonymous is anyone. But when a hack occurs that's morally nebulous to a majority of people, out comes the ablative armor of a unified voice of denial.

In a thread about suspected Anonymous members being arrested your post would be +5 Insightful. But here you get down modded because their supporters deem this information counter productive to their damage control efforts. They can't have it both ways and have reasonable people believe them.

Anonymous : a loosely organised leaderless temporary collection of individuals who come together on an ad-hoc basis on occasion to perform hacks then disband

With this kind of (lack of) structure anyone can claim to be anonymous, and no-one can... the one thing you can be certain about a spokesperson fro anonymous is that they don't speak for the group as a whole...

"This is Anonymous"
"That wasn't Anonymous, just someone claiming to be!"
"Anon here, don't listen to them, they are not Anonymous"...and so on into infinity. Anonymous can be anyone, and can be an individual or group. There is no one single "Anonymous", hence the name. Unless they're blowing up a van on the news. That's Anonymous.

Is this even a data leak? "Names and social security numbers" -- I'm sure that information is all publicly available. Couldn't anyone simply run a few thousand social security numbers by some official government lookup web service and get these names?
Now, TFA says "personal information, SUCH AS names and social security numbers". When I see a wording like that in a context like this, I'm convinced that "names and social security numbers" is precisely all it is!

I'm sure these people's full names, street addresses and social security numbers are public information by law, and you can already look it up online. And at least half the population have their phone numbers publicly listed in a phone book or its online equivalent...

no. the social security numbers are not public, neither are the addresses or phone numbers. and especially that they're on some db isn't public information.

Depends on the jurisdiction. I would bet the social security numbers aren't public, but the rest of it probably is. In fact, I have handy access to a database with names, addresses and numbers of thousands of people, and you probably do to; the phone book.

I'm sure these people's full names, street addresses and social security numbers are public information by law, and you can already look it up online. And at least half the population have their phone numbers publicly listed in a phone book or its online equivalent...

No they aren't. Social security numbers especially should be kept secret. While street addresses can be look up, everyone has the right to block such look ups. You don't need to give a reason and it's easy to do online. I have done so. It can make things a bit more difficult (for example if you forget your key inside and call someone to open the door, they can't check by calling that you actually live there), but anyone is free to choose. Since this leak comes from private databases, it would had bypassed t

In my jurisdiction, phone numbers can be blocked (private information) though not many people do. Your address however, is very certainly public information if you live in a Land Titles jurisdiction. Anybody and their dog can stop by the land titles office, spend a few bucks, and find out who lives at my address. Canadian privacy laws specifically exclude addresses from the list of protected personal information.

The moral of the story is, don't just assume that all your information is private, check the law

Bit of background: Finland has pretty strict privacy laws, and compiling personal detail lists, such as this, is subject to regulation. Very few care about that. What really matters is that storing such lists has certain requirements - and disseminating them is explicitly unlawful.

The leaked list is apparently a compilation of 10 (or more) smaller lists. Criminal Bureau are going after the person who compiled and published the list, and the morons who compiled the original lists will probably get off with less than a slap on their wrists.

The original compilations have been passed around via mailing lists. I'll let that sink in.

[Puts on the cynic hat]What should be a wake-up call to enforce the collection and dissemination rules will be used to drum up the threat of Anonymous and increased possibility to get spammed. The real problem, namely the near-criminal negligence with which this type of data is handled, will be ignored.

In a nutshell: someone who had access to multiple lists exposed a systematic indifference to privacy laws and the utter ignorance of decent practices. The leak itself will be vilified, while the practices which allowed this to happen with such trivial effort are unlikely to be addressed.

Actually we haven't had social security numbers in Finland since 1971 when they were changed to national identification numbers [wikipedia.org]. The number is not public and you aren't required to give it to every company. A company may require it only if they loan you money or something that is comparable to money (such as subscription from a phone operator, car rental etc.).

National identification number is used in every governmental office and in every private contract that you make in Finland and it really identifies

Finnish newspaper Iltalehti [iltalehti.fi] (in Finnish) is now reporting that the attempt by some members of Anonymous to claim the leak is a hoax. Actually, the person or group claiming responsibility did probably do neither of the leaks. The "new" leak was actually published already three weeks ago, and someone just copied that leak and tried to gain news coverage for his political ends.

The most astonishing thing with this story is the medium. This is the first time in quite a while I've seen an easy to read, easy to navigate web page (from a news organization) where the actual content gets the majority share of my screen real estate.It also was so quick to load that I couldn't really believe that it was done, and for a long while after it had finished I simply sat staring at the page wondering when the rest (the crap!) would arrive. It never did.

Yes, anonymous = nimetÃn. Anomuumi is not actually a word at all. It can be a mix of the word "anonymous" and "muumi" where "muumi" means Moomin but I'm not sure about this. Basically it's just common nickname which a lot of people use. In fact, I used it some years ago at Helsingin Sanomat forum but I'm not the Anomuumi in question here.

And what comes to the incident, my knowledge is that Anonymous has already denied that they had anything to do with this.

Wrong forum to say this, but listen to me, all you call yourselves Anonymous!

Forget about "V for Vendetta". Now, take a history lesson from someone who's not of the first world and grew up in a communist paradise [notmysock.org].

Guy Fawkes did British revolutionaries a complete disservice. First up, he was a religious nutjob who wanted to kill a king for religious intolerance. The end result of which was that finally the king had a real good & proper reason to hunt down the catholics. The ordinary catholics ended up in a long drawn struggle and bore most of the collateral damage out of the actions of an anarchistic commune. Those thirteen proved to be as bad for the catholics as the original.

With the new "Guy Fawkes" vigilantes are similarly giving ammunition to the government to grab control of the internet, choke down every protest fair or otherwise. You assholes aren't fighting authority, you're just the reason giving their oppression
legitimacy in the eyes of the people who don't want to be accidentally your targets for the lulz.

And here's some advice from my dad, "If you really want to be a rebel, live for the rebellion, don't die for it". Now, if you want to be a martyr instead... don't take me down with you.

Well said. The idea of 'Anonymous' being counter-productive and merely a pretext for authoritarian moves (think of the fire of the Reichstag being used by Hitler so seize control of the parliament) has been repeated for a few months here on Slashdot.

Now, if there were a group called Anonymous and if they were convinced by such words, odds are that you could very well continue to see more hacks perpetrated in the name of Anonymous. That's the second vicious twist in this terrible idea, which consequences are

If you believe in something, have the balls to stand and die for it, otherwise you're just a coward or as history has shown, probably french. No revolution ever succeeds without real strength. Peaceful revolutions do not exist, never kid yourself otherwise. The govn was already looking for ways and reasons to control the internet and protests, this doesn't do anything to stop that. The simple fact is they have it anytime they want it and there is nothing the masses can do to stop it short of violence.

As is usual with these types of news the story has been blown out of proportion. Other then some social security numbers, nothing "personal" was leaked. The information in the leak ios mostly data like adresses and phone numbers which are puiblicly available in the first place.

Yes, someone could in theory use the leaked SSNs to do something malicious but that's extremely difficult. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the fact that these sorts of leaks are becomming more and more common even though you'd think

Yes, someone could in theory use the leaked SSNs to do something malicious but that's extremely difficult.

Oh please. All they have to do is sign up for an e-commerce website, put in the SSN number and they can order stuff with a bill and not have to pay for any of it.

Signing up for a mobile number with that information is very easy and once you have one of those, you can take out small loans from some of the shadier companies. Sure, it's not world ending stuff, but it'll be a pain in the ass for anyone to deal with.

Whether this is the "real" Anonymous or not (how can something that has no set identity be real or not?), they're kind of getting out of hand.

Sometimes they have an agreeable cause (in my opinion, but that's just the thing, it's an opinion) but all the people calling for regulation and full traceability of the internet will be pointing at this "Anonymous" lot and saying "That's why".

They like to make themselves feared, but it's just going to drive more people towards wanting to do anything to protect the in